Called out for being a blackhat spammer?

By Jenstar on September 19, 2005, 6:48 am

A noted an interesting trackback this morning going to my YPN case study about one of the first sites showing Yahoo’s Publisher Network ads, Womens-Finance. Primarily, he is accusing womens-finance as being nothing but a black hat spam site.

I find this amusing on a few levels.

First, he claims that it is scraped content, based solely on the usage of such tags in the HTML as:

<! #BeginEditable content >
and
<! #EndTemplate >
notes.

He claims that is the use of a program such as Traffic Equalizer and on his site, you will note the fact he actually links to Traffic Equalizer using an affiliate link… perhaps hoping those who want to copy what I have done will believe that is what I used and then use his affiliate link to buy it?

But anyone who uses Dreamweaver will recognize those kinds of tags as being simply Dreamweaver template tags. The “content” tag denotes an editible region where I can change the content from one page to the next, while stll using the same template. I could have named that particular region “bananas” if I wanted to. But some templates I use on other sites can have up to five or six editible regions, so I usually name the region where the main page content goes something easy like “content” “article” or “main”. And the end template tag simply denotes where the template content ends.

Next, he claims the pages indexed are only the result of the link from JenSense when I did the case study, as well as site maps:

12 comments to Called out for being a blackhat spammer?

>But I find the fact I am being accused of being a blackhat SEO pretty amusing, because I am endlessly teased about being too straight-up with my various websites by many of my friends who lean slightly more to the dark side 😉

I always suspected you had a black heart. Now those dreamweaver tags prove it

Of course – if you did use traffic equalizer or some other program – you should delete any fingerprints to such a program.

That is the problem with many of them.

However – it appears to me he just got a good link from your site – so maybe he is smarter than I think.

I’m glad to see that there are still nice people on the web who can admit when they are wrong. Mad props to Black Hat for his apology. And perhaps a warning to the rest of us who have blogs. Never under estimate the power of the ‘published’ word! Hopefully this incident will encourage us all to be careful in what we post.

A friend of mine once had 100+ people who read his blog believing in a plane crash that didn’t happen. He saw a parachute stunt at night that looked like a plane crash 😀 We’re only human 😉

I really hate the asshats that feel like publicly calling out “search engine spammers”. Posting personal information and asking anyone to call them, email, stop by and beat them up is criminal. I wish these uptights yocals would focus on stopping rape or cancer at least something worthwhile.